FORD V FERRARI (US - 2019) Directed by James Mangold. Written by Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth and Jason Keller. Cast: Matt Damon, Christian Bale, Jon Bernthal, Caitriona Balfe, Tracy Letts, Josh Lucas, Noah Jupe, Remo Girone, Ray McKinnon, JJ Feild, Jack McMullen, Corrado Invernizzi, Gianfranco Tordi, Benjamin Rigby, Wallace Langham, Jonathan LaPaglia, Ward Horton. (PG-13, 152 mins) With a pace as relentless as the 24 Hours of Le Mans race that takes up most of its third act, FORD V FERRARI is a throwback to the kind of vintage, character-driven, star-powered crowd-pleasers that we don't see nearly enough of these days. It's probably the fastest two and a half hours of the year, and it's also nice to see it click with moviegoers in a year when films aimed at grownups haven't been doing well (a shame nobody went to see MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN). It's a quintessential dad movie that's both feel-good and a man-weepie. It's funny and filled with riveting action, dramatic tension, quotable dialogue, and terrific performances all around. At its heart, it's a classic buddy movie and one of the best films about racing ever made, but is engineered as such that you don't even need to be a racing fan or a huge car aficionado to get completely sucked into it. "They don't make 'em like this anymore" is a cliched turn of phrase, but it applies here. FORD V FERRARI is the kind of mainstream, multiplex popcorn movie that ends up winning a ton of awards simply because it gets just about everything right and is almost impossible to dislike.
Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) won the 24-hour endurance race Le Mans in 1959 but was soon forced to retire from the circuit after being diagnosed with a heart condition. By 1964, he's a successful businessman who runs Shelby American, which builds and modifies sports and racing cars for the circuit and for private buyers wealthy enough to afford them (Steve McQueen is mentioned as a regular client). At the same time in Detroit, Ford is struggling and CEO Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) demands solutions from his marketing team. His VP Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) suggests they abandon the '50s style vehicles and start focusing on flashier, sportier cars to appeal to Baby Boomers who are now driving age. Iacocca goes even further by suggesting they make the Ford name synonymous with cool (Iacocca: "James Bond doesn't drive a Ford." Ford II: "James Bond is a degenerate") by entering the racing world in a partnership with Italian auto magnate Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone), who rules Le Mans but is secretly facing bankruptcy. When Ferrari reveals himself to be playing them simply to drive up his asking price for preferred partner Fiat, and insults an enraged Ford II--aka "The Deuce"--and the entire Ford company, the blustering CEO orders Iacocca and senior executive VP Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas) to find the best engineers and drivers in the US--with no expense spared--to design and built a Le Mans-ready machine and crush Ferrari into the ground.
Iacocca immediately meets with Shelby, knowing he's the best in the business, and the top driver Shelby has in mind is his British buddy Ken Miles (Christian Bale). Miles is the best at what he does, but he's hot-tempered and doesn't play well with others, and he rubs Beebe the wrong way by showing up at an event as Shelby's guest and wasting no time derisively dismissing the Mustang, Ford's newest product on the market. Fearful that Miles' abrasive personality makes him the wrong driver to represent Ford, Beebe forces Shelby to keep his friend behind the scenes to placate Ford. But when none of the Ford drivers finish the '64 Le Mans, Shelby convinces Ford to allow Miles behind the wheel going forward, much to the sneering disapproval of the scheming Beebe, who basically functions as the film's chief villain. It's hard to imagine turning the engineering of the perfect racing vehicle--in this case the Ford GT40--into compelling cinema, but that's exactly what FORD V FERRARI does, culminating in the 1966 Le Mans, where Ford's racing team, headed by Miles, gives Ferrari his first serious competition in years.
Titled LE MANS '66 in Europe and some other parts of the world (apparently American moviegoers have no idea what Le Mans is--they probably don't, even though we already had the Steve McQueen vanity project LE MANS way back in 1971), FORD V FERRARI began life nearly a decade ago as a Tom Cruise-Brad Pitt teaming set to be directed by Michael Mann. Cruise's OBLIVION director Joseph Kosinski was later attached, though nothing ever happened and the two stars moved on. The script by brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth (EDGE OF TOMORROW, GET ON UP) was tweaked by Jason Keller (MACHINE GUN PREACHER, ESCAPE PLAN--the latter under the pseudonym "Arnell Jesko"), and directing duties landed with James Mangold, one of Hollywood's top journeymen (COP LAND, GIRL INTERRUPTED, 3:10 TO YUMA), coming off 2017's LOGAN, arguably the UNFORGIVEN of superhero movies. The end result is pure entertainment from start to finish, anchored by Damon, who sometimes appears to be channeling Tommy Lee Jones in his portrayal of a take-no-shit Shelby, and Bale, who's rarely been this loose and likable onscreen, even when Miles is being a surly, uncooperative pain in the ass (Bale gets to show Miles' soft side in his scenes with Caitriona Balfe as his supportive wife who never hesitates to let him have it when he's got it coming to him, and Noah Jupe as their son, who idolizes his dad). They get excellent support from Letts, Bernthal, Girone (who lets his scowl do most of his emoting), Ray McKinnon (bringing a Dennis Weaver-ish folksiness to Shelby's chief engineer Phil "Pops" Remington), and Lucas, who makes an utterly punchable Beebe, depicted throughout as a servile, boot-licking toady who's willing to throw anyone under the bus if it makes him look good in The Deuce's eyes. While there is no doubt some liberties taken in the service of telling the story, FORD V FERRARI is exhilarating filmmaking and an inspired addition to the pantheon of underdog sports cinema.
LOGAN (US - 2017) Directed by James Mangold. Written by Scott Frank, James Mangold and Michael Green. Cast: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Dafne Keen, Boyd Holbrook, Stephen Merchant, Richard E. Grant, Eriq La Salle, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Elise Neal, Quincy Fouse, Rey Gallegos, Daniel Bernhardt, Jason Genao. (R, 137 mins) I hit a wall with Marvel and DC movies about a year ago with the realization that I just didn't care about them anymore. LOGAN seems to be cognizant of that sentiment as it's a comic book movie like no other, one that seems designed for people who are tired of the same old comic book movies. It's a risky proposition for something so commercial to go so defiantly against expectations. An established, moneymaking franchise hasn't wandered this far in an unforeseen direction since UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING. For starters, LOGAN is the most graphically gory film of its type since the 2008 cult classic PUNISHER: WAR ZONE, almost playing at times like it comes from an alternate universe where Mel Gibson was hired to direct THE PASSION OF THE WOLVERINE. It's doubtful that this move into hard-R territory would've been possibly without the huge success of the smug and douchey DEADPOOL, but that's where the comparisons end. A deconstruction of its franchise's own mythology and a downbeat, mournful elegy of the dark side of heroism inspired by Mark Millar's Old Man Logan comics series, the ambitious LOGAN is cerebral and audacious, an outside-the-box attempt at exploring the psychology of a scant few lost and broken X-Men who are the last of their kind and know the end is near. It's visceral, bleak, and uncompromising, with director/co-writer James Mangold taking a more personal thematic approach to this than he did on 2013's little-loved THE WOLVERINE, which he took on as more of a gun-for-hire job after Darren Aronofsky quit during pre-production. The Logan of LOGAN is more in line with other Mangold protagonists like Sylvester Stallone's Freddy Heflin in COP LAND and Christian Bale's one-legged Civil War vet in 3:10 TO YUMA: sad, bitter, burned-out and beaten down by life, and generally just going through the motions until something comes along that inspires them to give a shit again.
LOGAN takes place in 2029, years after nearly all of the X-Men have died off and 25 years since the last mutant was born. James Howlett, aka Logan (Hugh Jackman) is a disheveled alcoholic dividing his time between driving a limo in El Paso and scoring seizure medication for Prof. Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), who's holed up an an abandoned factory in the outskirts of a small Mexican town just south of the border. Now 90, Xavier is suffering from a degenerative brain disease that causes him to lose control of his telepathic powers without proper meds, which are getting more expensive by the day. The pair share their living space with albino mutant Caliban (Stephen Merchant), who takes care of housekeeping duties like Felix Unger to Logan's Oscar Madison. Logan is contacted by Gabriella (Elizabeth Rodriguez), who wants him to drive young Laura (Dafne Keen) to North Dakota where she's to meet some other young mutants and cross the border into Canada. Logan is incredulous, as no mutants have been born in nearly three decades, but when Gabriella is killed and he realizes that Laura is being targeted by a heavily-armed security force with cybernetic right arms led by Pierce (Boyd Holbrook), he ends up on the run with Xavier and the child in tow. Pierce is employed by Transigen, a company ostensibly conducting pediatric cancer research at a medical facility in Mexico, but they're really breeding a new strain of mutant using the DNA of X-Men like Logan. Judging from her retractable knuckle blades, Xavier immediately concludes that Logan's DNA was used to father Laura. With Pierce abducting an ailing Caliban and forcing him to use his powers to track them down, Logan, Xavier, and Laura form a tentative three-generational family unit, with Xavier reminding the misanthropic Logan "This is what life looks like...people love each other...you should take notice."
The characters are the key component of LOGAN, but it doesn't skimp on the action. The trio has several run-ins with Pierce and his employer, chief villain and asshole geneticist Dr. Zander Rice (Richard E. Grant), there's a terrific car chase, and there's a couple appearances by Wolverine clone X-24, also played by Jackman. The level of violence in LOGAN is sure to surprise even the most jaded moviegoers: between the two of them, Logan and Laura stab, skewer, slice, dice, decapitate, and disembowel everyone Transigen sends their way, tallying up a body count that makes John Wick look like a hesitant rookie. While it meets the action content requirement, LOGAN is about the people, and even though it functions as a standalone work, this is a film that couldn't have been made had Jackman and Stewart not had so much experience with these characters. They've inhabited these characters through multiple installments and the audience knows them so well over the last 17 years that the more serious approach carries significant emotional weight. Like Clint Eastwood's reformed killer William Munny in UNFORGIVEN, Jackman's Logan subverts expectations and serves as a genre commentary on itself (in addition to Logan being an outcast who has no place in the world, there's additional western motifs that Mangold drives home by showing Xavier and Laura watching SHANE on TV). Logan is dying from the slow poisoning caused by the adamantium that makes up his claws and runs through his body. He knows the end is near for him, Xavier, and Caliban and that when they die, the X-Men die with them, even if they live on in the "bullshit" comic books that Logan sees wherever he goes. The bond that he and Xavier form with Laura gives him a reason to live, a reason to do what's right before the lights go out on a life that's seen too much pain and death. Of course, doing so requires doling out more pain and death, and therein lies the conundrum. Jackman and Stewart are so good in LOGAN that they warrant legitimate Oscar consideration, though it'll never happen. They're matched by an impressive Keen in her movie debut. She has no dialogue for the first 3/4 of the film and instead relies on facial expressions and the most penetrating, "don't fuck with me" side-eye you'll ever see. This kid has an intimidating look to her that goes way past "resting bitchface." LOGAN is an instant classic of its kind, the most extreme superhero bloodbath since PUNISHER: WAR ZONE, the best serious genre offering since THE DARK KNIGHT, and a thoughtful and often profoundly moving drama that looks at the last days of dying legend. One of the best films of 2017.
Directed by James Mangold. Written by Mark Bomback and Scott Frank. Cast: Hugh Jackman, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tao Okamoto, Rila Fukushima, Famke Janssen, Svetlana Khodchenkova, Will Yun Lee, Haruhiko Yamanouchi, Brian Tee, Ken Yamamura. (PG-13, 125 mins)
A largely stand-alone adventure for the most iconic character in the X-MEN canon, THE WOLVERINE draws a bit from events in 2006's X-MEN: THE LAST STAND and the Silver Samurai makes an appearance, though with a significant change to his identity so as to thoroughly enrage the purists. Hugh Jackman turns in his toughest, grittiest performance yet as Logan, introduced living in the wilds of the Yukon and haunted by visions of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) trying to coerce him into joining her in death. This is not possible for the immortal Logan, who's then brought to Japan by spunky sword-fighter Yukio (Rila Fukushima), a mutant with the ability to see when someone will die. Yukio has been sent by dying tech giant CEO Master Yashida (Haruhiko Yamanouchi), who was rescued from the Nagasaki bomb by Logan during WWII. Logan's been told that Yashida wants to personally thank him for saving his life all those years ago, but his real intention is to harness Logan's immortal life force and allow the pained ronin--masterless samurai--to live a normal life and to grow old and die. Yashida fears for the safety of his beloved granddaughter Mariko (Tao Okamoto) and distrusts his duplicitous son Shingen (Hiroyuki Sanada), who has already committed Mariko to an arranged marriage with promising politico Mori (Brian Tee). Yashida dies and yakuza thugs ambush the funeral, kidnapping Mariko, sending Logan and Yukio into action. Logan finds Mariko and the two go on the run, with yakuza and ninjas in hot pursuit, but Logan finds himself in a weakened state, his abilities partially drained by the lethal Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova), incognito as Yashida's oncologist.
A somewhat draggy middle is surrounded by a rousing first and third act, with several intense fight and action sequences, most notably Logan and a yakuza battling it out atop a bullet train going 200 mph. The funeral ambush is another memorable set piece, as well as the final showdown between Logan and the Silver Samurai, introduced much later in the film and with a surprising true identity. Jackman is a lot of fun here, playing Logan at his absolute crankiest and least patient. He's given terrific support by a tremendously appealing Fukushima, a beautifully odd-looking young actress who resembles an anime character come to life. It's great to see '80s Eurocult/Italian post-nuke fixture Yamanouchi (ENDGAME, THE NEW GLADIATORS, 2019: AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK, 2020: TEXAS GLADIATORS) getting some significant screen time in a huge Hollywood blockbuster, and only Russian actress Khodchenkova seems like the weak link in the ensemble. An award-winning actress in Russia, Khodchenkova is hampered by playing the film's most weakly-constructed character and by the obvious fact that her entire performance has been awkwardly dubbed over by someone else, so distractingly at times that it's very likely this was a rushed, eleventh-hour decision by the filmmakers. She certainly has the screen presence, so if her performance is lacking, it may not be entirely her fault.
The film was originally set to be helmed by PI and REQUIEM FOR A DREAM director Darren Aronofsky, who bowed out and was eventually replaced by the unlikely James Mangold, director of COP LAND, GIRL INTERRUPTED, WALK THE LINE, and the remake of 3:10 TO YUMA. More at home with character-driven drama, Mangold handles massive action sequences quite well, but as far as superhero movies go, this is comparatively smaller and more character-based, so perhaps he's not as unusual a choice as one might think. If anything, THE WOLVERINE deserves some credit for being the first big superhero/sci-fi event movie of the summer to not resort to climactic 9/11 disaster-porn imagery and benefits nicely from its unique Japan setting. The script is credited to Mark Bomback (UNSTOPPABLE) and veteran screenwriter Scott Frank (OUT OF SIGHT, MINORITY REPORT, THE LOOKOUT), though they reworked an early draft by an uncredited Christopher McQuarrie (THE USUAL SUSPECTS), who was attached when Aronofsky was supposed to direct it. THE WOLVERINE could use some tightening in the midsection, and runs a little long at just over two hours, but if you're burned-out with the same old blurrily-edited schtick in big-screen superhero cinema and if your eyes just glaze over at the thought of more dull and interchangeable CGI destruction, then this welcome change-of-pace may have come along at just the right time in the summer.
